Anthropology

A diagram of how the skeletons of Australopithecus sediba came to be preserved in the Malapa cave deposit. From Dirks et al, 2010. A little less than two million years ago, in what is now South Africa, a torrential downpour washed the bodies of two humans into the deep recesses of a cave. Just how their remains came to be in the cave in the first place is a mystery. Perhaps they fell in through the gaping hole in the cave roof just as hyenas, saber-toothed cats, horses, and other animals had, but, however the humans entered the cave, their bones ultimately came to rest in a natural bowl…
A leopard (Panthera pardus). Image from Wikipedia. When a leopard eats a baboon, what is left behind? This question is not only relevant to primatologists and zoologists. Even though instances of predation on humans is relatively rare, big cats still kill and consume people, and when they do they can virtually obliterate a body. Yet, just like a human criminal, the dining habits of big cats leave tell-tale clues, and in 2004 researchers Travis Pickering and Kristian Carlson fed two captive leopards eight complete baboon carcasses each in order catalog the most useful ways to identify the…
Want the dirt on the new species of fossil human which will be described in Science this week? Tune in to the BBC World Service "Science in Action" program this Friday to hear me discuss the discovery with host Jon Stewart. The program should be available on the web sometime after it airs, as well.
According to multiple reports released yesterday, scientists will announce the discovery of a new species of two-million-year-old hominin this week. Do you know what that means? That's right; writers are breaking out the pop-sci boilerplate to tell us all about the new "missing link." To paraphrase what I have seen in the headlines alone, the find is the "missing link which will shed new light on human evolution and rewrite what we thought we knew about our history." I don't believe the hype, but I can only speculate on the actual significance of the specimens in question. According to the…
And now, it is time for the April 1st edition of Four Stone Hearth, the four field Anthropological Blog Carnival. Our first submission is from Somatosphere, a blog about Science, Medicine and Anthropology, and it is about the discover of Big Foot in the Poconos Mountains of Pennsylvania! No kidding, this time they REALLY FOUND BIG FOOT. Click here to read about bigfoot. Our next installment is from the blog Seeing Race, and is live blog coverage of a recent investigation into the Burbank TV studio that was used in the Faking of the Apollo 11 moon Landing! Seriously! CLICK HERE to find out…
The partial faces of Anoiapithecus (left), Pierolapithecus (center), and Dryopithecus (right). (Images not to scale) Our species is just one branch of a withering part of the evolutionary tree, the great apes. Along with the handful of species of chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans, we are all that is left of the hominids, and considering the threats our close relatives face we could very soon be the only great apes left. It has not always been this way. During the swath of prehistory ~23-5 million years ago known as the Miocene a variety of ape species inhabited forests through much of…
A comparison of three-dimensional scans of hominin footprints. Top) A footprint made by an experimental subject using a normal, "extended" gait. Middle) A footprint made by an experimental subject using a "bent-knee, bent-hip" gait. Bottom) A Laetoli footprints. From Raichlen et al., 2010. About 3.6 million years ago, at a spot now in Laetoli, Tanzania, a pair of hominins trudged through the ashfall dumped onto the landscape by a nearby volcano. We don't know for certain what they looked like (it is generally believed that they were Australopithecus afarensis from the presence of fossils…
                 Coca-Cola sucks India dry.      Image: Carlos Latuff / Wikimedia CommonsThe marketing executive who came up with Coca-Cola's popular slogan in 1908 most likely never expected it would be taken so literally. However, a hundred years ago there probably weren't many who imagined a term like "water wars" could exist in a region that experiences annual monsoons. On February 25 a complaint was filed in the New York Supreme Court against the The Coca-Cola Company alleging that they knew about and sought to cover up human rights abuses in Guatemala. While that trial gets started,…
A simplified evolutionary tree of primate relationships showing the placement of Darwinius in relationship to other groups. From Williams et al., 2010. The study of human origins can be a paradoxical thing. We know that we evolved from ancestral apes (and, in fact, are just one peculiar kind of ape), yet we are obsessed with the features that distinguish us from our close relatives. The "big questions" in evolutionary anthropology, from why we stand upright to how our brains became so large, are all centered around distancing us from a prehistoric ape baseline. Despite our preoccupation with…
In light of the Oscars this Sunday I thought those of you who missed it would enjoy my review of District 9 (which is up for four Academy Awards including Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay). Inexplicably, a UFO appears over one of Earth's remote cities. Hovering a few hundred meters above the terrified citizens, a government mission to board the craft is executed only to find the strange beings living in disease and desperation. A decision is made to save their lives and relocate the aliens to the city's outskirts. In that moment, what seemed to be a compassionate action develops…
Nuuchaanulth Ceremonial Curtainfrom the Family of Naasḳuu-isaḳs of the Hupacasath Nation Human beings around the world honor their dead and the memories of their relatives. We have enacted special rituals related to the handling of human remains from the sacred funeral pyres of India to the professionalized aseptic embalming practices of the United States. Even more so, the treatment of the dead by outsiders is something that can generate outrage. Consider the media controversy when Al-Jazeera aired footage of coalition soldiers who had been killed by Iraqi militants or the hanging of…
Souvenir shops in South Africa are full of lamps made out of ostrich eggs. The eggs are so big and strong that you can carve and cut intricate designs into their shells. The egg's contents are emptied through a hole and a bulb can be inserted instead, casting pretty shadows on walls and ceilings. The results are a big draw for modern tourists, but ostrich eggs have a long history of being used as art in South Africa. The latest finds show that people were carvings symbolic patterns into these eggs as early as 60,000 years ago. Pierre-Jean Texier from the University of Bordeaux discovered a…
An adult chimpanzee in Bossou, Guinea uses hammer and anvil stones to crack nuts as younger individuals look on. From Haslam et al., 2009. Before 1859 the idea that humans lived alongside the mammoths, ground sloths, and saber-toothed cats of the not-too-distant past was almost heretical. Not only was there no irrefutable evidence that our species stretched so far back in time, but the very notion that we could have survived alongside such imposing Pleistocene mammals strained credulity. Contrary to what might be immediately expected, however, it was not Darwin's famous abstract On the Origin…
News! Toba caldera in Indonesia. We're all still talking about the Chilean earthquake and the coverage of the event. If you happen to live in the Columbus area, you might have heard me on WTVN talking about the earthquake as well. The Toba (Indonesia) eruption 74,000 years ago has been used by some researchers to be the cause of a "genetic bottleneck" for humans - however, that is still much debated. Currently, excavations are under away near Toba to look for evidence of human habitation that was buried by the eruption. The evidence of stone tools that appear to be made by the same human…
Meet !Gubi, the tribal elder of a group of Bushmen (or Khoisan), one of the oldest known human lineages. He lives the life of a hunter-gatherer in the Namibian part of the Kalahari Desert. But he also has a strange connection to James Watson, the British American scientist who helped to discover the structure of DNA. For a start, they're both around 80 years old. But more importantly, they are two of just 11 humans to have their entire genomes sequenced. Along with Archbishop Desmond Tutu, !Gubi is one of two southern Africans, whose full genomes have been sequenced by Stephan Schuster and…
Meet "Inuk". He is the ninth human to have their entire genome sequenced but unlike the previous eight, he has been dead for some 4,000 years old. Even so, DNA samples from a tuft of his frozen hair have revealed much about his appearance and his ancestry. Inuk had brown eyes and brown skin. His blood type was A+. His hair was thick and dark but had he lived, he might not have kept it - his genes reveal a high risk of baldness. Inuk may well have died quite young. Like many Asians and Native Americans, his front teeth were "shovel-graded", meaning that their back faces had ridged sides and…
Is chimpanzee food sharing an example of food for sex? One of the most important transitions in human evolution may have been the incorporation of regular food sharing into the day to day ecology of our species or our ancestors. Although this has been recognized as potentially significant for some time, it was probably the Africanist archaeologist Glynn Isaac who impressed on the academic community the importance of the origins of food sharing as a key evolutionary moment. At that time, food sharing among apes was thought to be very rare, outside of mother-infant dyads. Further research…
Hits of the week: Savage Minds (with a spiffy website redesign) asks Why is there no Anthropology Journalism? Jerry Coyne takes sharp exception to both a paper and a SciAm Mind Matters article by Paul Andrews and Andy Thomson arguing that depression might be an evolutionary adaptation. Dr. Pangloss punches back. (NB: 1. I was founding editor of Mind Matters, but no longer edit it, did not edit the Andrews/Thomson piece, and don't know any of these people. 2. While my recent Atlantic article presented an argument for how a gene associated with depression (the so-called SERT gene) might be…
"The Barefoot Professor", a behind-the-scenes look at the new Nature paper. Humans that had to escape from saber-toothed cats, giant hyenas, and charging mammoths did not wear Nike or Adidas sneakers. They ran barefoot, but don't feel too bad that they did not have good running shoes to help them. As suggested by a team of researchers led by Daniel Lieberman in the latest issue of Nature, habitually shoeless runners have a unique step that may be better for our feet than even the most expensive, cushioned running shoe. Whenever I go for a jog I run in the way that is most familiar to me.…
How can you turn a monkey into a man? By feeding it "Rex" Brand Extract of beef, of course! I might just have to throw in a bid on this Victorian promotional card. In bizarre fashion it combines several mythical elements common to popular depictions of human origins; that we evolved in a straight-line fashion, that consumption of meat made all the difference in our transformation, and that men "led the way" in the evolution of our species. Each of these misconceptions has been cast out of the scientific arena in turn, but they still pop up from time to time, especially in advertising.…